International Mahjong Battle @ RTD

in October of 2016, after finally planning my first ever trip to Japan with Daniel Moreno of PML, I emailed Shingo Tsunoda, creator of the online mahjong game Tenhou.net, to ask when the next Tenhou Real Trial would take place, however he did not know so I instead asked him if he would like to play mahjong with us. The original plan was just to meet in a Jansou and rent a table for a few hours but Tsuno had a different plan. He instead rented 3 tables at the RTD (Riichi Tsumo Dora) Lounge, a jansouesque lounge set up by ex-Saikouisen professional Toshimasa Chou whose aim was to create a space to play mahjong that does not have the bad connotations that jansou have.

Once the venue and date was decided, Tsuno and I sent out invites to six people each. Interestingly, I had sent invites to 4 westerners and 1 Japanese person while Tsuno sent his invites to 4 Japanese people and 1 westerner. The final list of players were:

Matchups and scorekeeping was arranged by Mahjong Watch's Taro Kawashita, there was no particular method to arranging the matchups but he did attempt to minimize the amount of times the same people played.

For dinner we went to Tsurutontan just around the corner and had Japanese Udon.

Apparently Tsunoda got some flack for not making this event more public, especially to westerners. This was mainly my fault as I was handling invites for westerners. I hope if there's ever a next one (2018 perhaps?) we'll be able to be more public.